


common cruelty

by Aenqa



Series: the sword & the pen (dream smp) [5]
Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Dream is Not Okay, Gen, Isolation, Pandora's Vault, Prison, Prisoner Clay | Dream (Video Blogging RPF), Time - Freeform, Violence, Warden Sam | Awesamdude
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-17 16:53:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29475033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aenqa/pseuds/Aenqa
Summary: The clock makes a gentle ticking sound. If you weren’t listening for it, you’d probably never hear it. Dream doesn’t think it’s intentional. He doesn’t think the manufacturers of the clock purposefully built in a ticking effect or anything. And it’s not like the clock has a seconds-hand or a minutes-hand, so it’s not a constant noise. But it ticks. It definitely ticks. When it shifts, simulating the procession of the sun across the sky, it ticks.-In Pandora's Vault, Dream passes the time.
Relationships: Clay | Dream & Sam | Awesamdude, Clay | Dream & TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF)
Series: the sword & the pen (dream smp) [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2125335
Comments: 63
Kudos: 521





	common cruelty

**Author's Note:**

> This fic deals with Dream during his time in prison and deals with themes of violence, isolation, and mental illness. The Mature rating is a bit overly safe, but I wanted to be cautious with this one.
> 
> Title adapted from Tom Disch's poem ["Eternity"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=32705)
> 
> Enjoy!

The clock makes a gentle ticking sound. If you weren’t listening for it, you’d probably never hear it. Dream doesn’t think it’s intentional. He doesn’t think the manufacturers of the clock built in a little ticking noise or anything. And it’s not like the clock has a seconds-hand or a minutes-hand, so it’s not a constant noise. But it ticks. It definitely ticks. When it shifts, simulating the procession of the sun across the sky, it ticks. 

These are the things Dream would say to someone, if he had anyone with him here. But he doesn’t, so he just practices the conversation in his head. He’ll say it to George, when he visits, or Sapnap, when he comes. And they will visit, eventually. They’ll visit. He’ll say it to Bad or Punz, who might feel bad enough to drop by. He’d say it to Tommy, but Tommy hasn’t come back. Not since the first time.

He’ll say it to someone, is the point, so he might as well rehearse his lines now.

_Tick._

The clock is really less of a clock and more of a sun dial. It doesn’t count the hours as much as it marks the shift of days. It consists of two halves, a day side and a night side, which spin clockwise in little bursts, making its little fake sun and moon stutter and jump across the sky. The dial is enclosed in cool yellow plastic, and it fits neatly into Dream’s palms when he pulls it off of the wall. He turns it over in his hands and holds the back of it up to his ear, where he can hear the little gears shifting and turning and clicking and ticking. He wants to open it up to see how the inside of it works, but he doesn’t have any tools, so he just has to imagine it.

Sometimes, he tries to imagine the real sun and the moon marching from east to west, like he knew them for the first twenty-one years of his life. But that makes the clock seem so small and pathetic. Eventually, he stops. He focuses only on the clock. It might as well be the real sun and moon, those tiny little slivers of poorly painted plastic on the wall. It might as well be the real stale-blue sky.

_Tick._

“If you destroy that thing again, I’m not giving you another one,” Sam says.

Dream blinks up at him. He had been too busy listening to the clock to notice Sam’s appearance.

“Why would I destroy it?” he asks.

Sam’s face is dark. “Why have you destroyed it a dozen times by now?”

Dream shrugs because he doesn’t know. Honestly, he’s pretty sure Sam is lying to him about the whole clock situation. He never remembers throwing it in the lava; the clock just keeps disappearing, and then Sam gets angry at him, and then Dream tells him he won’t do it again. And then it happens again. A cycle, a circle. Like the clock, repeating its journey over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and

_Tick._

Sam asks him more questions but Dream is tired of talking and Sam never wants to hear him talk about the clock so he leaves eventually. At least he doesn’t try to read any of Dream’s books. Not that there’s anything new or important written there, but Dream still objects to the intrusion on principle.

At first, Dream had tried. He had written what he was doing each day to try and keep a grip on the passage of time. To try and remind himself of everything that had happened. But eventually, he read back his list of daily activities and realized they looked exactly the same.

_Day 10. Woke up, ate some potatoes, watched the clock. Tried to exercise. Wrote this entry._

_Day 11. Woke up. Potatoes for breakfast. I held the clock for a little while. Then I sat down to write this._

_Day 12/13. I think I might have missed a day but I’m not sure. I was watching the clock for a while so I might have missed it. It’s easy to lose time_

_Day 13/14. Woke up. Potatoes for breakfast. I feel like the clock is moving faster than before._

_Day ??? Forgot to write here for a while. I’m sick of potatoes. I’m sick of writing. I’m sick of the clock._

He hasn’t written in a while.

_Tick._

Dream has never

never

never

never

never experienced anything like this before. When he got here he thought he would be strong enough to handle it. He thought he was good at being by himself. That’s how it’s always been, anyway. Even when he wasn’t alone, he was alone. George and Sapnap – they pretended to be his friends, but they never were. They were pretending. They were lying. They were manipulating him. He knows how it works. He knows how it happens. He’s done it, himself. He’s done it, himself. He knows they were lying.

_Tick._

But this is different. Before, his loneliness had context. Other people to make him real and fill out the world. Isolation is a different beast.

Isolation is not quiet. It is loud. His head is so loud. His thoughts hurt like electric shocks in his brain sometimes. He can’t think too hard about what’s happening to him, so he sinks into fantasies and daydreams, illusions of different times and different places. Better worlds.

He thinks, first, about the years he spent with George and Sapnap, before anyone else was there to bother them. These thoughts, ultimately, hurt more than they comfort, and he eventually locks them away.

_Tick._

He likes, especially, to think of the rotting crater of L’Manburg, and to remember how it was done by his hand, the destruction and the terror and the ripping apart of old wounds into something newer and worse and more beautiful. He loves to remember the look on Tommy’s face, the utter devastation. It was the culmination of everything he had done up until that point. It was perfect.

And the way Tommy hadn’t even tried to fight him, not even then. The way he had slunk onto that obsidian path in the sky and just pleaded with him, as broken and helpless and desolate as he had been in exile (another point of fond reminiscence for Dream). He was looking for some explanation, some meaning, to the suffering he was enduring.

_Tick._

Of course there wasn’t any meaning, and there wasn’t any purpose, and there wasn’t any explanation – other than the one that Tommy didn’t want to hear. That nobody could be allowed to care about anything more than they feared and respected Dream. That Dream would carefully, meticulously, and in totality destroy anything that approached that hard limit.

But he took it too far. He made them fear him too much. They feared him, but they didn’t respect him enough to kill him. He has to rot here, he has to sink into himself here, he has to float through the blurring hours and the whirling days and the agonizing seconds until he’s _learned his lesson._

Dream wastes no time learning or regretting anything because he knows it will never matter. He knows he will never leave.

_Tick._

When he runs out of happy memories he thinks of the future, imagines a world in which he escapes and tears down the prison to rubble and uses its bricks to bash through Sam’s skull (he thinks about this a lot) he thinks about calling in his favor with Technoblade and ordering him to kill Tommy (just for the sake of watching it happen) he thinks about making Tubbo watch before he kills that kid himself; he would kill Punz, too, for the betrayal, and anyone who had ever set foot in L’Manburg: Quackity, definitely

_Tick_

and Fundy and Eret and Niki and all of those half-traitors who liked to pretend they were good people. He would resurrect Wilbur just to show him L’Manburg’s corpse and then kill him again. He would resurrect Tommy, too, so that he could have the pleasure of killing him himself. He doesn’t think he could kill Technoblade, but he could definitely kill Philza. That would be the last thing he did, Dream thinks, because then Techno would kill him and the whole thing would be finally, finally over.

_Tick_

No good to dwell on things that will never happen.

_Tick_

Dream opens his eyes and stares accusatorily at the clock. It’s speeding up, he thinks. It’s definitely speeding up.

_Tick_

The sun is practically sprinting across the sky. He jolts to his feet and stumbles forward to look at it. Plants his hands on either side of the frame and stares at the clock. Watches it.

_Tick_

It’s going faster. It’s broken. This clock is fucking broken.

_Tick_

And it’s making time go faster, it’s distorting reality, it’s making his days pass in blinks. It’s not fair, it’s not fucking fair – it can’t steal his time from him, too – Sam can’t do this to him, he can’t give him a broken fucking clock –

_Tick_

God, and the sound is getting louder, too. It must be intentional, actually. It must be another one of Sam’s fucking mind games. It must be

_Tick_

FUCK Dream can’t think, he can’t think, his mind is a rushing crushing avalanche of

_Tick_

“SHUT UP,” he screams, his voice raw in his throat –

_Tick._

It burns so nicely in the lava, and Dream has quiet, finally, quiet, and time slows down again. He sinks to the floor and stares at the empty frame where the clock used to live and smiles, and then he laughs, and then tears are streaming down his face and he buries his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking with hysteria.

Isolation is a desert, it’s the bottom of the ocean, it’s void-space. It strikes clean and consumes. It eats in tearing bites; it possesses hunger and always asks for more. Isolation pounds like a headache and sinks like fever, lights Dream’s brain on fire and numbs him like anesthesia. He feels nothing, he feels everything. There is no longer a meaningful distinction between within and without – and every moment is endless.

“You did it again,” Sam says and Dream tears his head up, his eyes bloodshot and panicked.

“What,” Dream says hoarsely.

Sam’s annoyance blares like an alarm. “You burned your clock.”

Dream swallows and looks at the empty frame. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Well, I’m not giving it back.”

But Dream needs it, _he needs it,_ he needs an anchor, he needs something to tell him that he is still alive and rooted in reality, so he cries “no” and jumps to his feet and rushes towards Sam, “you have to give me the clock you have to or I’ll -,” 

Sam’s trident hits him and electrifies and Dream stumbles back, the shocks ringing up and down his arms. He doesn’t hate the feeling; it’s something different, at least. It’s a sort of attention. It’s a sort of exchange between the two of them. A conversation.

“I don’t have to give you shit,” Sam says.

“Yes, you do,” Dream says. “We made the plans together, remember?” A manic laugh bubbles up in his chest. “We sat down and decided. The prisoner needs a clock. A way to mark the passage of time.”

Sam’s face clouds.

“You remember,” Dream says in a sing-song, daring to take another step closer. “You remember, I know you do!! Because I remember, too, Sam!! I remember how I paid you to build this whole fucking place, except I was gonna put Tommy in here instead – _ha_ can you imagine having to –,”

Fists clench his shirt and slam him up against the wall. His back hits the stone and Sam is snarling up at him, his face a mask of rage.

“I would never have let you put Tommy in here,” Sam says.

That makes Dream laugh, too. This is all so fucking funny. And Sam’s attention feels good, he wants it to keep happening, so he says: “You didn’t care that much when I had him all to myself in exile.”

Sam freezes.

“Did you not know?” Dream says, astonished and pleased. Sam will love this, or he’ll hate this, but it’s all the same. “Oh, nobody cared about poor Tommy, back then, not like they pretend to do now. And we had so much fun together, we really did. Tommy still probably has some of the scars to prove it –,”

“What did you do?” Sam asks, his voice verging on a break. “Tell me.”

Dream tsks at him. “Don’t worry, Sam,” he says soothingly. “I only hurt him if he didn’t listen.”

Sam drops him and punches him in the same fluid motion, and blood pours from Dream’s nose into his smiling mouth. There’s a fist in his stomach that blows his breath out, and then Sam throws him to the ground, where he scrapes his hands and knees. Dream spits out blood and laughs and laughs: the karma, the _karma,_ the fucking cycle, the cycle, the cycle. He remembers his own knuckles splitting against Tommy’s face, the bones he broke, the burn marks on the kid’s skin from when Dream threw him into that final explosion, and he thinks with glee: _I fucking deserve this._

“You’re sick,” Sam spits at him. “You’re – you’re a goddamn monster.”

There’s no need for Dream to respond; the words are more for Sam’s sake than they are for his own. But when Sam turns his back and walks towards the lava, Dream calls out.

“The clock, Sam,” he says cheerfully through blood. “You have to give me the clock.”

Sam stops. 

“I know what a stickler you are for rules,” Dream says with a giggle, bringing the back of his hand up to wipe blood across his cheek.

Sam turns, his face written with cold fury, and he takes out another one of those beautiful yellow plastic clocks. Dream’s face lights up and he moves towards it, and Sam brings the clock up in the air and smashes it on the ground, where it shatters into several pieces.

“There’s your fucking clock,” Sam says before the lava swallows him whole.

 _Come back and let’s do it again,_ Dream thinks but doesn’t say.

He inches towards the shattered plastic. He gathers the pieces up in his hands. The cover is broken, and the sky-dial is dislodged from its mooring. The fake sun and moon will never shift. But it doesn’t matter, because when he brings the clock up to his ear, he can hear it. He can hear it. He can hear it.

_Tick._

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! if you enjoyed, kudos/comments/subscriptions mean a lot! <3 
> 
> [tumblr](https://aenqa.tumblr.com) / [twitter](https://twitter.com/aenqa1)


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